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Monday, August 27, 2012

I'd Be Lying if I Said This PV Was Crap

Gingham Check, the song, is like that beautiful scoop of ice cream atop a cone. But instead of remaining delectable and scrumptious, said ice cream fell off the cone and onto the sidewalk, becoming a gooey, melted mess.

Gingham Check, the PV, is like the friendly ice cream man who witnessed your despair at losing your beloved ice cream so he picked up that messy scoop of ice cream, added sprinkles and chocolate syrup, placed a cherry on top, and gave that new and improved ice cream cone back to you.

I don't think this has ever happened so drastically before. In the past, whenever I find a song to be bad, usually the PV isn't all that good or only marginally better and either way it almost always doesn't improve the song itself. But Gingham Check... this single has been driving me mad. I was ready to pull the switch and call it quits on this even being a halfway decent Senbatsu song until I watched the PV. And for the first time, there's such a contrast between my love for the PV and my hatred for the song that I don't know where to start... I guess the easiest thing to do is sum up my original feelings. So when Gingham Check was first released via live performance I was... underwhelmed to say the least. Frankly, I loathed the song and now I still loathe it just not as much as I used to. Anyways, the problem I had with the song was that it was incredibly dull. I heard the same sound I'd heard from over half of AKB48's discography (think Chance no Juban or Ue Kara Mariko to catch my drift) and the song was more generic than the generic soft drinks at my local Wal-Mart. Call it... Catchy Generica because despite how much I hate these kinds of songs they always, always implant themselves in my head in some way. Usually I find myself humming only the chorus on an endless loop and hating every minute of it. And so this was what happened for Gingham Check. Even now the only reason the chorus isn't stuck on chronic repeat in my head is because I'm blasting Chocolate Disco as I write this.

Gingham Check is currently a contender for worst A-side of 2012 for yours truly along with the future Janken single which I expect to be bad because they're always half-assed. But the thing with Senbatsu songs is I never expect them to be half-assed and I think that's one of the driving reasons why I can't stand this song so much. In the past, every Senbatsu song has had a very distinctive and powerful hook to it. Iiwake Maybe had the rock-ish influences, Heavy Rotation was idol music presented in the best and most energetic way possible, and Flying Get was a badass song with an even more badass PV. But Gingham Check is more vanilla than French Kiss' discography and lacks anything memorable or iconic. If 2011 me heard this song by some weird means of time-travel I would never think "Wow! What a great Senbatsu song this is!" because I wouldn't even think it was one, not even a B-side for the Senbatsu. And that's what makes Gingham Check such a huge slap in the face... It's like Pixar releasing WALL-E, Up, and Toy Story 3 and then releasing Cars 2. That's how I feel about this Senbatsu song. It's not a Senbatsu song, at least not to my ears. So after I'd concluded Gingham Check was a Gingham Mess, I was more than ready to dig my claws into the PV and pretend this single never happened. I'd seen bits and pieces of the PV and had pretty much concluded it would be just as much of a mess as the song was. And then I saw it.

This PV... good lord, this PV... is fucking amazing.

Damn you, Aki-P! Why do you have to hire a good director that gives this crap song a PV that so mind-blowingly amazing I'm left with conflicting feelings!? It would have been so much easier to bash the song, bash the PV, and move on to something else but noooo, you had to get me to love this, didn't you? I loved it so much I screencapped the shit out of it!

Ah, the Tokyo Police HQ, where justice (and donuts!) are served!

Somewhere, in some far off place, an Acchan hater is screaming in joy...

I don't know why but John Steele reminds me of a duck :D

Careful, Acchan! Emote too much and the world will implode on itself and cause a rip in the fabric of space and time!

Off she goes to collaborate with RiDOS so that there combined blandness will cause a rip in the fabric of space and time!

The Motorgirls definitely have the better costumes of the two gangs...

But come on. The Car Devils have Takamina, Miichan, Rena, Umechan, and Mayuyu. Car Devils win the title of Nia's Favorite Gang (I never thought I'd have a favorite gang...)

From now, Yuko shall be called Jill Powers in these shots! By the way, the fact that there's probably a faction of the Yuko fandom ready to stone her for having a fake-relationship in a PV with a guy brings me great amusement :D

Wow, this director's quite brave to show Yukirin with another man! He'd better lock his doors and sleep with a gun to escape the wrath of her angry stalker-wotas now!

And so they all lived happily ever after via High School Musical jump!

So... are you guys still here? Because that was a very, very, very, long screencap. I'm serious, the record for longest screencap I've ever done now belongs to Gingham Check with 80 freaking screencaps. But you know why there are so many? Because this has got to be one of the best PVs of 2012. I shit you not, Gingham Check, a song I actively hate, has now earned a place in my cold, unforgiving heart thanks to just how amazing this PV is. Thank you, Joseph Kahn. Thank you for blessing us with such entertainment I can forget about my hatred for this song for 6 minutes and enjoy one of my favorite music videos of 2012.

Something you should know about my preferences when it comes to PVs is I hate cute PVs. With a few exceptions, I just can't stand cute PVs. They're are so sweet I can feel myself getting diabetes. You can show me the most adorable, moe-moe idols prancing around being adorable and cutesy and moe and I won't bat an eye. I think that's boring. What I do love, and I mean really love, are quirky PVs. These are the PVs that take an angle and twist it into something weird and sometimes awkward at times but it works. Think Kare to Issho ni Omise ga Shitai, all of Kyarypamyupamyu's PVs, and even a few Perfume PVs. On Nia's Scale of Quirkiness, the Gingham Check broke the scale, pieced it back together, then sold it on Ebay. For AKB48, the main theme of this PV is what the director described as an homage to Japanese cinema. Throughout the PV you get little shout-outs to Japan like the Sadako-type ghost girls haunting Mayuyu and the Godzilla-esque monster rampaging through a city chasing after Yukirin. Is it a little stereotypical? Maybe, but who fucking cares? Kahn went with a concept and he went all the way with it. You can tell that all the election money from Manatsu no Sounds good! was put into this PV. There are so many different scenes, special effects, stunning costumes, and so. Much. Quirkiness. I loved every bit of it. There were so many different elements thrown together into this PV but it wasn't messy; it worked. It worked so well! The overall tone of the PV was a combination of cheesiness and campiness and all the girls looked like they were having so much fun in the PV! One thing I really loved were all the captions done in perfectly clear English! Not Engrish, pure, grammatically correct English! The captions helped fuel the campy fun of the PV and added to the quirkiness. There are so many scenes from the PV that I loved, it's near impossible to name my favorites (other than Sasshi and her axe) but other things I did enjoy that stuck out to me more than the whole thing were Takamina and Umechan as angels, the Sadako girls, the Thriller dance, Mayuyu's Creeper Smile, and Chompy. I'll miss Chompy :(

A complaint within the fandom is that too much emphasis is put on Yuko and Mayuyu and everyone else got shafted so they could get more screen time. Do I think this is true? Well... yeah. But the thing is, I'm surprisingly okay with it. It might be because I'm a fan of both Yuko and Mayuyu and they have such distinct personalities that they can carry a PV together. Does that mean the other girls don't have personalities? Of course not! And I thought it was cool how everyone sort of got to do their own thing in the PV. Mariko, Jurina, Sae, and Tomochin got to be robbers; Takamina and Umechan were lovely angels/fairies; Sasshi, Tomomi, and Harunyan were horror movie schoolgirls; Yui and Miichan were alien scouts(maybe?), and the top three Senbatsu members each got their own main storyline. Of those three storylines, I think my favorite was the horror movie storyline and not just because Mayuyu's the star. As a fan of horror movies and someone who's seen Ringu, Ju-on, and a few other famous J-horror films, I loved seeing AKB48 do their own little ode to that genre. It was funny and even slightly creepy at times and the captions were amusing and rode along with the campy feel of the entire PV. Another storyline I enjoyed much more than I thought I would was Yukirin's Godzilla storyline. I figured since I'm not much of a Yukirin fan I wouldn't really pay attention but then Chompy came in. I loved the animated giant monster and the ditzy approach Yukirin and her boyfriend took to the whole situation. I even laughed when she was innocently singing into a giant megaphone with the giant monster right behind her! And last but not least (hell, she's number 1) I really enjoyed Yuko's cops-in-love storyline; it was the perfect blend of action and cuteness. I always like the way Yuko acts in PVs; she's really quite a decent actress and can go from silly and playful to serious and dramatic. There's also the surprisingly well-done "gang/fight dance battle extravaganza" between two sides of the Senbatsu. I loved the West Side Story vibes I got from this and I found it blended really smoothly with the rest of the PV, something I wasn't expecting. I seriously didn't want this PV to end; it was just so well-done that I would almost say it was perfect. I literally don't think there was one thing I disliked about it other than the song.

But yep, underneath all that campiness and fun is still that generic song I so willingly struck down several paragraphs ago. One criticism you can make is that the only reason the PV has so much going on is to distract the viewers from the fact that the song itself stinks. But I don't see it that way. I think Gingham Check's PV has added on to the song and given it a new angle, much like Flying Get's PV did. And isn't that what a PV should do? Shouldn't it give you more than just what you listened to, turning the raw audio into a visual spectacle that stays in your mind long after you've heard the song and seen the video. The way I see it is you have songs like Beginner and Spring of Life which are already extremely good and their PVs only add on to the top-notch quality they are. And then you have songs like Gingham Check and Spending all my time which are mediocre songs that are improved when combined with memorable music videos that give substance to something that was once bland and generic. Through this musical metamorphosis, Gingham Check has become more than what I was originally presented with, and I'm astounded by the end result. So in layman's terms... you got me to care about Gingham Check, Aki-P. I hope you're happy in that pool of money you're most likely lounging in right now.

Go watch this. Even if you hate AKB48, go watch it. You might be surprised at what these Akibahara chicks can pull.

What I meant by the first sentence above, is that (unlike Yukirin and Mayuyu [I think]), Yuko's already done numerous romances and love scenes, some going much further than this. Most of her fans (aside from a few rabid outliers) have either accepted or embraced it.

Also, "I think Gingham Check's PV has added on to the song and given it a new angle, much like Flying Get's PV did."

Given that the lyrics are all about fevered ambivalence, i.e. both hating and loving a thing at the same time, I think that's a very accurate observation.

What? I like Acchan! She was always a little awkward in music videos, but very endearingly awkward! In hindsight, she's been my favorite center of AKB48, her and Takamina. I actually kind of miss her now that she's not in AKB48 anymore...